Tangible
by Abigail-Nicole
Summary: Sometimes I get tired of seeing in code. Sometimes I need to see something I can touch. NT angstfluff.


**Tangible**  
by Abigail Nicole  
PG-13 to be safe, romance/angst, no spoilers   
**Summary:** "Sometimes I get tired of seeing in code. Sometimes I need to see something I can touch. N/T angst/fluff.   
**Notes:**I've had this idea for quite a while; got it after staying up till 1am to watch Matrix1 (and still haven't seen 2/3 yet, either). 1st Matrix fic. 

* * *

_The Matrix cannot tell you who you are..._

* * *

You didn't even see the code after a while, Cypher said. You just see the pictures.

And now he just saw the code. 

Green, long columns of numbers and symbols, fading in and out, back and forth, such simple tools with such a great power. Something so small that controlled reality. And he could control them. 

For a moment, he tried to see the pictures, staring half-past the code, and he caught a glimpse: a street; brick buildings, a gray cracked sidewalk with a daisy growing through it, a brunette in a black skirt, a mother pushing a stroller, a child staring up at the sky, almost like she was staring straight at him, through the black swirling clouds into his eyes...

And then the picture faded. But the symbols remained. He stared at them, reading them, and he knew what they were without seeing the pictures. A new way of seeing. Like the machines, staring at the pure code of things. 

And it was so easy to manipulate the code, to change the numbers. It was just another hack job--not even a difficult one, because he just had to bend the numbers with his mind. Easy as making a seven an eight on a report card—only easier. He bent his mind and the Matrix went with it, fives to zetas to sixes to alphas to fours to elipsons to zeros. Finality. 

_Absolute Zero. _

He was reaching absolute zero, where all motion stopped, where he knew the numbers, where he got drunk on the power, reveling in this newfound ability to do anything, so he stopped everything. And suddenly, he craved to do just that—anything. Things he could never do. Things so simple that they hurt--lying on his back in bed, staring out the window at the stars, twinkling in the night sky. Sitting outside in the sunshine, watching the sunshine play in the trees, watching rain fall outside his window in great heavy droplets to splatter on the concrete outside. 

He loved his memories. He never saw memories in code. 

Even Trinity--he looked at her in the Matrix and he saw her code, separate from the rest of it, yet whole in and of itself. And it unnerved him. That code _was_ Trinity, everything about her—her hair, her eyes, her softsoft skin, her lips, so sweet, her hair under his hands, her smell in his nose, inches away from her, her hands, so smooth and soft and tingling against his skin, the way her hair stopped at the base of her neck as he kissed his way around it—and he could change it. In the Matrix, he could change even Trinity. 

He wouldn't for the world. 

Everything. He controlled everything--the columns of numbers an symbols that ran in and out, glowing with a green spectral beauty, ethereal in the darkness of its background, pictures-but-not-quite in his mind—reality at the edge of a string. And he saw the pictures, before he knew he was the One—and after that they were just washed-out watercolors in his mind. 

Now he didn't even have that to comfort him.

"Why do you watch them like that?" 

Her. Strings of symbols ran through his head, dancing tantalizingly around his mind, codes for the way she smelled, codes for the hair she had and her face and eyes and clothes she wore and how to remove them—

He shrugged. "I can read it," he said softly. She shifted behind him, putting a hand on his shoulder, and her code-in-his-mind changed, shifting with her, dancing green numbers that was her, lurking right out of sight, open to change by him, him alone. Not even the Agents could change someone who had been freed, but he could. He could control any of the code in the Matrix, and that meant Trinity. 

"It's not real," she said gently, and he laid his cheek against her hand on his shoulder. 

"I know," he said quietly, but it was a desperate plea. "Sometimes I get tired of seeing in code. Sometimes I need to see something I can touch."

She used her free hand to stroke the side of his head gently, pushing hair behind his ears. "Then look at me," she said quietly. "Look at me. Touch me. This is real, Neo. And this is what you live for."

He turned around quietly, standing up and pulling her to him, burying his face in her hair, holding her so tightly it seemed like there couldn't possibly be anymore room between them, but it's too far for him. She wrapped her hands around his back, feeling the tenseness there, and a helpless rage boiled through her. She just wanted him to relax. She just wanted him to have a moment where the weight of the world was not on his shoulders. 

Tangible. She was tangible. 

And that never showed up in the code. 

It was only something he could find out for himself. 


End file.
